It’s been a relatively unsuccessful season for our home garden.

I’ve been planting and maintaining a home garden for the last 20 or so years. It’s fun, productive and a great way to enjoy fresh vegetables right out of the back yard. We’ve had good seasons and bad seasons, as with most anything, and this year, we had a relatively bad season I would say.

First, we moved our garden to a different location in the yard. On top of that, we used a totally new raised bed system this year. I don’t think either of those really made a difference in the quality (or quantity) of harvest. It basically mimicked exactly what we’ve had for the last several years.

One thing different this year was my soil. I used a different brand and didn’t prep it quite as good as previous years, mostly due to time constraints. It has also, for whatever reason, got tons of weeds in it.

Consistency is important

I know that consistent maintenance is key to producing a great garden, I just didn’t realize how important it was until this year. This is the first garden since we had our daughter, which as you can imagine, limited the amount of time that I could spend outside maintaining the garden. The inconsistency of upkeep I believe had a major effect on the outcome.

The final verdict

We ended up with some great tomatoes, a handful of cucumbers and some decent okra this season. The onions were a bust, the bell peppers were a bust and the strawberries simply never panned out. The onions never grew bigger than maybe tennis ball size and just didn’t seem to do well. Not sure if this was soil conditions, depth or what. The bell peppers started off awesome but every single one of them rotted once they got to about golf ball size.

Tomatoes did great this year and we enjoyed excellent vine ripe reds and also had some amazing fried green tomatoes this season! The cucumbers took a while, but have now started doing really well and we’re getting some great ones. The tomatoes and cucumbers are still going strong and should continue for another couple of weeks.

While our current garden is still producing, I’m already planning for next season. I’m also planning for different (and much better) results! We’ve also decided to start from seeds next season, rather than buying the plants from Home Depot. Not sure it will matter, but it’s an experiment that I have wanted to try for a while.

——————————————————————————Are you into gardening? Do you have a home garden? Drop me a line in the comments and tell me about it!